Friday, May 19, 2017

What the Ladybug Knows

Ladybugs Pack Wings and Engineering Secrets in Tidy Origami Packages

After ladybugs fly, they tuck
their wings into a sliver of space between their abdomen and the
colorful outer wings for which they are best known.Credit
Jean-Michel Labat/Science Source

The
ladybug is a tiny insect with hind wings four times its size. Like an
origami master, it folds them up into a neat package, tucking them away
within a slender sliver of space between its abdomen and the usually
polka-dotted, harder wings that protect it.

When
it is time to take off, it deploys its flying apparatus from beneath
its colorful shell-like top wings, called the elytra, in only a tenth of
a second. And when it lands, it folds it back in just two. Switching
between flying and crawling many times in a day, the ladybug travels
vast distances.

To the naked eye, this elegant transformation is a mystery. But scientists in Japan created a window into the process in a study
published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Just how the ladybug manages to cram these rigid structures into tiny
spaces is a valuable lesson for engineers designing deployable
structures like umbrellas and satellites.

A ladybug’s hind wings are sturdy enough to keep it in the air
for up to two hours and enable it to reach speeds up to 37 miles an
hour and altitudes as high as three vertically stacked Empire State
Buildings. Yet they fold away with ease. These seemingly contradictory
attributes perplexed Kazuya Saito, an aerospace engineer at the University of Tokyo and the lead author of the study.

Working
on creating deployable structures like large sails and solar power
systems for spacecrafts, he turned to the ladybug for design
inspiration.

“Ladybugs
seem to be better at flying than other beetles because they repeat
takeoff and landing many times in a day,” he wrote in an email message.
“I thought their wing should have excellent transformation system.”

Previous
research could not explain the intricate folding patterns Dr. Saito
observed on the beetle’s hind wings. And studying them was difficult
because the elytra stay down and block the view during folding.

“I wanted to know what they actually do under the elytra,” he said.

Through
teeny, tiny surgery, Dr. Saito and his colleagues swapped out a
colorful top wing with a transparent, artificial one and filmed what
happened with high-speed cameras. His team also captured super-detailed
3-D X-ray images. Together these unmasked the puzzling folding patterns.

Imagine
trying to fold two 20-foot tents, with poles that do not detach, that
are stuck to your back beneath a plastic case and you have no hands to
help you. A ladybug does it throughout its day.

Researchers developed a transparent, artificial wing to study how ladybugs store their wings when they're done flying.

To
fold, the elytra first close and align backward. The abdomen moves up
and down, retracting the wings. And during the process, tiny structures
on the abdomen and elytra create friction to hold the hind wings in
place. The wings fold in and over and then tuck into a Z shape. The
veins on the wings, springy like a tape measure, bend into a cylindrical
shape, elastic under pressure. They bounce out like springs when the
wings deploy.

“The beetles can fold their wing without any mistakes from the first folding,” Dr. Saito said.

This ladybug origami may not help with your hypothetical tent-wings, but the principles behind it are increasinglysolving other engineering problems. The Japanese art has inspired self-assembling robots, a foldable lens on a Manhattan-size telescope, an inflatable heart stent,
and other space and medical devices, buildings and everyday objects.
Maybe one day, humans will develop our own specialized folding
techniques.

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About Me

This is a blog about what interests me. Here you will find stories on animals, including animal rights material, cute stuff, and random informative posts about weird, beautiful and interesting creatures. Horses, Spotted Hyenas, and Border Collies will make regular appearances.
Also prominently featured will be posts about the Arts. Animation, photography, and the traditional forms, plus "outsider art," film and books.
Other things that will surface here are Japan & the Japanese, John Oliver, surfing, skateboarding and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, interesting places and structures,and my own art, writing and photography.
There will be rants. It's an election year, and I am beginning to have a political dimension to my personality. I am also horrified at the level of injustice and violence visited upon people here in the US and elsewhere - particularly against people of color, immigrants, and the LGBT community. Some of these stories will be very hard to read, but I believe we must read them to keep ourselves mindful of the racist and vicious things that happen every day, to speak out when we see discrimination, and root out its evil from ourselves.